With the rapid growth of information sources now available to financial analysts and traders who must apply this information to a high volume of trades each day, it has become important to provide each trader with powerful computational facilities which can rapidly perform analysis, illustrate trending and provide decision information as required for profitable trading. The communications intensive needs for financial trading businesses continue to grow, as more and more different sources of information must be accessed for the trader to make an informed decision in his business activities.
However, merely multiplying the number of conventional computer-provided sources without providing the necessary communications between each trader out of a large group of traders and each source out of a large group of sources is highly impractical. Such multiplication of known systems requires a high installation expense and is cable intensive. It is also disadvantageous to depend upon large host computers, which are very expensive both to install and to operate.